In the 1940s, half-sisters Eva and Iris try to make a better life for themselves by perfecting the art of adapting to changing circumstances: They create a makeshift family as they move from Ohio to Hollywood and then to New York. Narrator Alicyn Packard's performance perfectly keys into the emotional drama of this story of love and loss, betrayal, and unexpected friendships. However, her weak characterizations sometimes leave listeners scrambling to remember the ages and backgrounds of the people who become important to the sisters. For example, Packard doesn't alter her register as the dialogue moves from that of a preteen boy to that of an adult woman, and she gives a Spanish-speaking hairdresser and a Chicago jazz singer the same accent. Despite these flaws, listeners will enjoy Packard's lively narration.
Pub Date: July 29, 2014
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780804191357
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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